Latest Comments on Science and Academia
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Why would anyone complain about penalizing research papers that have fake citations?
Arxiv, the popular preprint server, recently decided to penalize submitters of articles that contain non-existing references, presumably hallucinated by an AI. All authors will be sent to the doghouse, not just the first author. They’ll be blocked for a year from submitting new articles and will have their whole history reviewed, among other sanctions. While…
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Making final theses more agile
Over fifty years ago, Peter Naur stated that computing is a human learning activity. (I’m paraphrasing.) An example of this insight is that you may start a project with one set of requirements and that you may end the project (or timebox or release) with another (probably related) set of requirements. Requirements happen at the…
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Research vs. engineering
As annoying and repulsive as the world’s richest man’s behavior often is, he is a great source of social media entertainment. He recently complained that making a difference between researchers and engineers is a false dichotomy and hence xAI would do away with such a distinction. Obviously, it is xAI’s decision on how to label…
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Strategic issues when hiring professors
I have always wondered what makes a good hiring strategy for professors at a computer science department. Here are my thoughts on two dimensions: Core strength or best you can get? A common strategy is to double down on your strengths and hire more of the same. For example, at my engineering faculty, there are…
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Free reviews for commercial publishers?
So I had a little spat with an Elsevier editor who argued that reviewing for Elsevier journals should be performed for free, because Elsevier is part of the scientific community. Maybe they are part of the scientific community, but primarily they are a commercial enterprise which turns academic labor into profits for their shareholders, like…
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Comments on How to build a vibrant technology industry
Yann LeCun of AI / Meta fame put out a short piece on “how to build a vibrant technology industry” (local copy) focusing on the significance of basic research and the opportunities afforded to other countries than the U.S. right now. It is mostly about academia, how the U.S. system (still) is better than others,…